Les Libertateurs / Pretty Women is an adventuring band of Antiterra active from at least 1715 A.D.A., whose gesta (campaign-cycle) runs from Prague to the eve of the French Revolution. It was the first band to face a documented zodiacal guardian.
| Type | Group |
| World | Antiterra |
| Canonical members | Oratiol, Magda, La Plume, Casemiro |
| Spanish entry | Pretty Women |
Name
Their enemies call them Les Libertateurs; they call themselves Pretty Women, a name chosen by the band’s women. Another account says they were Pretty Women in pre-mercantile trade circuits and became Les Libertateurs once their revolutionary sympathies showed.
History
Around 1715 they meet in the Tiger bar in Praglava (a name joining Prague and Bratislava), while the Game of Shadows presses on this period. Later they are ten.
At the center of the gesta is a Host, consecrated and cursed at once (a pharmakon). The Call of Guilt in it lets it be tracked across the material plane. The Arkane Society wants it; the labyrinth under the mountain holds it; the band obtains it.
The arc runs through Prague, Virginia and New York (alliance with the American giant, druid contact), and Paris before the Revolution, including the Bastille episode. The Game of Shadows activates the Platform of Aries (21 March).
In Paris the band rescues the condemned, and also tortures. At the Host Poker, a card ritual in which captives pay with pain and revelations, they cross a line of no return. The Hierarch tells them: “You are already marked.” Monsieur David, the masked Executioner disfigured by molten lead, changes before Notre Dame.
They travel the twelve zodiacal platforms, plus a vacant thirteenth throne, as tides of time: they enter in 1717 and leave in 1784.
At the end, saving this world over infinite others, they imprison the Black Butterfly, guardian of all worlds. The 1788 portal, coded with Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities, remains open.
Members
- Oratiol — amnesiac water mystic from Gotland. His name is an anagram of Lotario, the same traveler two hundred years earlier; the devils of Notre Dame know his pact better than he does. He narrates the band’s sections of Sucesos de Antiterra in the first person.
- Magda — witch of fortune (and others’ misfortune), practicing the seiðr of the North.
- La Plume — the swordsman of the century. The skull-hilted sword is La Plume in one of its aspects; another account calls L’Plume “the sword of four centuries”.
- Casemiro — informant and distractor; American druids give him a mission about the Eagle and the Bastille. Same traveler as Pepsico in the Invisible Cities.
- Josephine; the Marquise; Krisina, who uses mind control and tactical invisibility.
- Also named: Gideon, a paladin with a magic wok, and the archangel Ariel.
Conflicting accounts
- The band is dated 1715–1784, but another note calls it active for about three centuries.
- One account says the real French Revolution does not appear, only its threshold; another records a revolution in Paris after the band frees those condemned to the guillotine.
Gallery
